Inside the Rise of the Warbots

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Inside the Rise of the Warbots

* *Peter Singer's Wired for War has been praised by everyone from former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake to Jon Stewart as a definitive look at the growing use of robots on the battlefield. Just before his talk at TED 2009, we chatted with Singer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and Danger Room contributor, about the rise of the machines.

__Danger Room: Your last two books were on mercenaries and child soldiers. Why the switch to robots?__Peter Singer: I think the opening line of my book explains it all: "Because robots are frakkin' cool."

The long answer is that as I looked around at everything from the Roomba that cleans my house (and scares my cat) to the drones my friends in the Air Force were flying, I became more and more convinced that something big was going on. When historians look back at this period, they may conclude that we are today at the start of the greatest revolution that warfare has seen since the introduction of atomic bombs. It may be even bigger. Our new unmanned systems don’t just affect the "how" of war-fighting, but are starting to change the "who" of the fighting at the most fundamental level. That is, every previous revolution in war was about weapons that could shoot quicker, further, or had a bigger boom. That is certainly happening with robots, but it is also reshaping the identity and experience of war. Humankind is starting to lose its 5,000-year-old monopoly of the fighting war.

So there is a thread that connects the past books I had done on private military firms and child soldiers. They are all about how the sands are shifting underneath us, about how our assumptions of "who" fights wars is very much changing in the 21st century. Robots take this to a whole new level.

__DR: __To you, what constitutes a robot? Does it have to be able to move on its own? Operate on its own? Does a relatively dumb, remote-controlled Packbot count? How about a smart but static system — I'm thinking the Phalanx air defense, which finds and tracks targets on its own?

__Singer: __I had a lot of fun exploring this in a chapter I call "Robotics for Dummies" — with me being the dummy. Robots are machines that are built upon what researchers call the "sense-think-act" paradigm. That is, they are manmade devices with three key components: "sensors" that monitor the environment and detect changes in it, "processors" or "artificial intelligence" that decide how to respond, and "effectors" that act upon the environment in a manner that reflects the decisions, creating some sort of change in the world around a robot.

If a machine lacks any of these three parts, it is not a robot. For example, the difference between a computer and a robot is the former’s lack of effectors to change the world around it. Interestingly, the machine’s sophistication has nothing to do with whether it is a robot. Just like biologic life might range in intelligence from bacteria and Paris Hilton to homo sapiens and Albert Einstein, our artificial creations also show widely levels of complexity. The same goes for autonomy, in that autonomy is a feature (a sliding scale of control), not an inherent part of the definition.

I do realize that this is still subject to debate. For example, some scientists say that in order to be a robot, the machine has to be mobile. Yet, this forgets that movement is just one way to change the world around you (as the world now has you in a different location). Defining only mobile systems as robots would not only exclude robots that work on factory lines, but would also be akin to defining paraplegics out of the human race. And that’s not frakkin’ cool.

__DR: __Obviously, the growth over the last five years in warbots has been astronomical. Where do you see the biggest growth in the next five years?

Singer: What we need to remember is that these are just the first generation, the Model T Fords compared to what is already in the prototype stage. What will a system be capable of five years from now if Moore’s Law holds true?

My sense is that we are going to see both a growth and widening in the use of robotics. That is, you will have greater and greater use in areas where robots have already shown their capabilities (surveillance would be a great example) and more and more new areas that robotics will move into (think medbots). This will be the case at land, in the air, more and more at sea and, of course, in space, where systems have to be robotic almost by definition.

This expansion is akin to computers' entry into the field of war a few decades ago. It will be a mix of proof of concept and growing acceptance. That'll be especially true as a new generation becomes more comfortable with robots (having used them in Iraq and Afghanistan) and advances further up the ranks. When I started this project, the idea of something like the UCAS (the unmanned fighter-jet prototype) was either unknown or a curse word in defense circles. Now, you have people openly talking about it as a supplement to, or even substitute for, something like the F-35 manned fighter jet.

DR: How could an over-reliance on robots backfire on a military — especially in an insurgency-type war?

__Singer: __A story I love is Arthur C. Clarke’s "Superiority." Set in a distant future, the story is written from the perspective of a captured military officer, who is now sitting in a prison cell. He tries to explain how his side lost a war even though it had far better and newer weapons.

"We were defeated by one thing only — by the inferior science of our enemies," the officer writes. "I repeat, by the inferior science of our enemies." Clarke’s future officer explains that his side was seduced by the possibilities of new technology. It plans for how it wanted war to be, rather than how it turned out. "We now realize this was our first mistake. I still think it was a natural one, for it seemed to us that all our existing weapons had become obsolete overnight, and we already regarded them as almost primitive."

The robotics trend is revolutionary, but it also doesn’t change the underlying fundamentals of war (something the Rumsfeld-era network-centric folks never got). The fog of war remains. While you may haveMoore’s Law, you can’t get rid of Murphy’s Law. The enemy has a vote, so while your technology may be amazing, people will rapidly make adjustments and develop their own counters.

So, in something like insurgency, technology can prove to be critical to success; take the drone-heavy Task Force Odin, which helped crack the bombmaking networks in Iraq. But it isn't a silver bullet. You still have human politics to master; the Sunni Awakening is just as critical to the "surge" story as Odin was.

Plus, there are all sorts of unpredictable effects, both short- and long-term, from using these systems. They are incredibly useful in carrying out precise, pinpoint strikes, without exposing soldiers to risk. So they negate many of an insurgent’s asymmetric advantages. But, when I went around interviewing people from the Middle East, for example, I also saw that there was a huge blowback effect from these technologies. As one news editor there put it to me [just after the2006 war with Israel] while a drone buzzed overhead, "just another sign of cold-hearted, cruel Israelis and Americans, who are also cowards because they send out machines to fight us…. They don’t want to fight us like real men, but are afraid to fight. So we just have to kill a few of their soldiers to defeat them." Yikes.

__DR: __We all assume that the U.S. will be the king of the bots. How could robots be used against us?

__Singer: __The U.S. is certainly ahead now in this revolution. But what should worry us is that in war, there is no permanent first-mover advantage. The Chinese and Turks first used gunpowder, but lost the gunpowder revolution. The French and British first used tanks, and then watched the German panzers roll right over them. The same goes in technology.

Today, 43 other countries are working on military robotics of some sort, including Iran, China, Russia and Pakistan. We have to be concerned about where our current trends in things like the state ofU.S. math and science education place us down the road. We have to ask whether our defense industry, which tends to specialize in building"bigger is better" systems, is the best model for success.

Robotic warfare will also be "open source" warfare. So much of the technology is off-the-shelf or do-it-yourself. Wired editor ChrisAnderson and friends have put together a drone for very cheap that is very much like the ones deployed to soldiers in Iraq just a few years ago.

Terrorists can use this open source warfare, too. For example, during its conflict with Israel, Hezbollah operated at least four UAVs. My sense is that we can expect that this combination of robotics and terrorism will 1) reinforce the empowerment of individuals vs. states and 2) eliminate the culling power of suicidal attacks. You don’t have to promise 72 virgins to a robot to convince it to blow itself up.

__Singer: __Yes, I do think we will see ripple effects on to our politics. A fascinating consensus across the disparate groups I met with for the book was that being able to move more and more Americans out of harm’s way may save lives, but also will change our very decisions on when and where to use force. "They [unmanned systems]lower the threshold for going to war. They make it easier, make war more palatable," said one. "Anything that makes it morally and ethically easier to wage war is not necessarily a good thing," another said. Tellingly, the first quote is from a human rights expert, whose job entailed trying to shut down the prison at Guantánamo Bay; the second is from a special operations officer just back from hunting terrorists to lock up there. Summed up one former Reagan administrationPentagon official, "It will further disconnect the military from society…. There will be more 'shock and awe' talk to defray discussions of the costs."

We aren't even yet [a] fully autonomous system and yet we already have newspaper editorials calling for unmanned machines to be used as a substitute for manned interventions. Pike's article talked up the possibility of doing so in Darfur. It is a reasonable argument, but war is never so simple. The problem is that military operations (even the weird irony of a humanitarian intervention outsourced to inhuman machines) are not simple throwaway commitments. They involve one in a complex, long-term situation on the ground, with a host of social and political contours. Moreover, when you unman your intervention, you may show that you care, but you also reveal that you don’t care enough.

Robotics thus take certain trends already in play in our democracy to their final, logical ending point. We already have a split between our civilian public and the military. With no more draft, no more declaration of wars, no tax or war bonds, and now the hope that theAmericans at risk are just going to be more and more American machines, we must worry that the already lowering bars to war may well hit the ground.

__DR: __OK, let's say warbots multiply a hundred or a thousandfold. What'll be left for us lowly humans to do? Anything?

Singer: I, for one, welcome our future robot overlords.

Yes, there are some areas where a robot might be able to surpass the skills or costs of a human soldier. But there are others where that day is far off. We don’t have human elevator operators now, but human toll collectors live on.

Technology has always changed how we look at professions and even ends some of them, but the funny thing is that many of the functions least likely to be roboticized will be in the areas that we generally consider simple. For example, it may take years to train up a sniper who can hit bull’s-eye again and again. But it is technologically easy for a robot to instantly place a targeting laser on a bad guy and shoot him. By comparison, the last thing that computers will ever hope to match is our "emotional intelligence." This is the part of the brain that makes sense of social situations, which is often the toughest part of a soldier’s job in dealing with complex situations in conflicts likeIraq or Afghanistan. So, that’s why so many folks think we will head towards "warfighter's associates" programs. These are mixed teams of human and robot soldiers, each doing what they do best.

I thought one scientist put it well: "My job will be eliminated before my hairdresser’s will." He may have a Ph.D. and carry out cutting-edge scientific research, but he can see the day looming at which machines may do that better. Compared to a scientist, a hairdresser may be considered a lesser-skilled profession (Jonathan Antin excepted). The reality is that [they] have to cut hair with an eye towards not merely precision, but also fashion and aesthetics. Plus, the customer has to trust them with a sharp blade near their eyes, ears and throat. It is hard enough for me to trust the drones at Supercuts, even more of a leap of faith with a barber made at Spacely Sprockets.

__DR: __Favorite Cylon?

__Singer: __The obvious answer would be Number Six (solely so that the editor can put up an eye-catching picture), but I gotta go with the old school Centurion, especially the ones with gold armor.